multiplayer game programming

Last updated:

Canvas

The game will play on an html5 canvas element and immediately I stumbled trying to understand the issue of scaling and size. This one remains 1280 by 720 (720p HD) but rescales to fit the available width on the current window within minimum and maximum limits.

Ready developed multi-player game engines are available to deal with client-server interactions and cope with things like lag due to network delays. I downloaded Lance (link is the header above), that looks promissing. After making the video below I realized that the server had timed out the inactive clients. Those then continued running as single player games on the client machines. All I needed would be some code to show when it had disconnected and reconnecting was simply a matter of refreshing the window. Note: I also wanted to see if I can get my embedded video to rescale just like the canvas above so I'm leaving this video here for now although it's not very relevant and it looks like I will need Javascript to maintain aspect ratio.

My next hurdle was to get the server javascript running on my current web hosting server. Alas that doesn't look promissing, so I experiment with one that can. The Heroku tutorial all went as it said but I ended up confused and unable to work out exactly how to put a Lance based game up there.

I decided to try some other game engines and the tuorials for Kiwi.js yielded this result (use A-S-D keys to move).

It wasn't immediately obvious how to make it render on my intended game canvas, nor to control the scaling to fit with my web page, but there are a lot of setup parameters yet to be explored.

However this is running entirely on the client machine and it was not clear from documentation if Kiwi.js actually provides the functionality for web based multi-player games. Those will require a game engine of some sort running on the server!

I then found Isogenic Game Engine that has been going for a few years. Video tutorials are online. The documentation definitely says it will do multi-player games.

Tutorial number 2 got stuck on the loading animation, but the first example file worked, and that looks just like how the tutorial was supposed to come out, so I'm going to work with this IGE for a bit and I will be blogging here how I get on.

.io game technology is ephemeral and ill conceived

I'm sick of relearning as the IT industry jump on a new trendy reinvention of the wheel.

It's time I finally get to focus on creative and artistic interests

I may pursue learning Android programming (although that's naff too), but I can use it in my photography hobby.